The Nomadic Four

I took so many videos in Japan, I couldn’t help but edit together a video to illustrate our time there. Enjoy!

Toward the end of our time in Japan, we took a detour to a museum to learn some family history. We visited the Chiune Sugihara Memorial Hall, a Holocaust museum dedicated to a Japanese diplomat who saved 6,000 Jews during World War II, by issuing transit visas so refugees could travel through Japan to escape Europe. One of the people to receive a visa was my grandfather. The concept of how special Sugihara is is not lost on the kids. If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be here. The museum is located in a small town called Yaotsu, where Sugihara is from. It took us four hours to get there from Kyoto, and involved several trains, including the oldest train I have seen in this country (and possibly ever), which took us to a tiny train station. It was lunch time and we were all hungry, but all we found to eat at the station were ice cream vending machines. We are lucky though, because when my cousin Jacob came here in 2009, he described to me a pilgrimage that was much more complicated and i...

Kyoto is smaller than Tokyo, with a lot of shrines, temples and traditional Japanese gardens. But it also has a lot of interesting and historic architecture dotted throughout the city. We loved exploring the areas called Ponchoto, Gion and the Nishiki Market, especially at night. Doing things at night was inevitable since it got dark around 5pm so we made the most of it. The city is vibrant and busy, full of tourists and an interesting mix of old and new. We rode the bus all over, staying out late to sip every last drop we could. We were all very fond of Kyoto by the end. We spent a wonderful afternoon at the Fushimi Inari Shrine, where we walked through hundreds of red torii gates all the way to the top and were rewarded by a gorgeous view of the city. We saw the Kyoto tower lit up at night from the central train station, and discovered a beautiful light display on the staircase at the station. We walked through a bamboo forest at Arashiyama. It was packed with tourists. We visited on...

After a whirlwind trip through Tokyo, we slowed down the pace and spent several days in three different mountainous areas a couple of hours from the city. We steeped ourselves in the Japanese art of forest bathing, went to actual hot baths (onsen) and took in some impressive views. Before I explain where we went and what we saw, I have to mention how amazed I am by Japan’s rail system. Although it takes some time to understand and navigate, it’s so impressive to me how you can get on a train that looks like a subway in Tokyo, ride it for two hours and get off in a small town in the mountains. You likely have to change lines a couple of times, but you can do it and you use the same payment system everywhere. You can also take high speed trains for longer distances, which are direct and very fast. And then you can get up the next day and go even further into more remote areas from the very same station. Plus some of the tracks are shared between the slower subway-like cars and the fast i...

Tokyo is huge and impossible to encapsulate in a nutshell. We spent a few fabulous days in this city full of fascinating new things to discover and foods to eat, trying to get a little taste of all the wonderful things it has to offer. But before we get into the details of what we saw and experienced, the first thing we noticed is how wonderful the Japanese people are. Everyone we spoke to before we came here who had been to Japan absolutely raved about it and I think it has a lot to with the people. They are so gracious, polite and helpful. The city feels the same way. Even when we’re in busy places like subway stations, it doesn’t feel chaotic; everything is just running smoothly and in an orderly fashion. Even places like the Shibuya Scramble Crossing, the Times Square of Tokyo: We arrived from Cairo via Doha, Qatar, and the jet lag here was intense. It took our bodies several days to adjust, and luckily on day one, we found some friendly, familiar faces: my cousin Jacob and his lov...